The Letters (26 page)

Was that enough? It had been. It used to be.

Sometime during lunch recess, when the students were playing a game of softball, Danny Riehl left a note in Mim’s desk. It read “Be at the phone at 5 PM tonight. DR”

So Mim was at the phone shanty at 4:30. The phone call came in at 5:00 p.m. on the dot.

“Hello,” she said, waiting to answer until the third ring. She didn’t want to seem too eager. Bethany was always telling her that boys didn’t like overly eager girls.

“Hello,” Danny said. “You can see the moons of Jupiter tonight. Through my telescope. Around ten. I’ll be there, at the hill behind the schoolhouse, I mean. Then I could walk you home. Or not,” he added quickly.

Stargazing with Danny Riehl!

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” Danny said.

Then the phone went dead. Danny hung up without saying goodbye. As soon as Mim put the phone back in its receiver, the phone rang again.

She waited for the third ring. “Hello?”

“Goodbye,” Danny said and hung up.

There was one bright spot about not having to work at the Stoney Ridge Bar & Grill: Bethany had more time to hunt for Tobe’s books. She had searched the house through, but to no avail. The attic was all that remained. No one ever went into the attic, which probably meant the books were there, hidden beneath cobwebs. She shivered. She hated spiders. Hated mice. But then she cheered up—the books were in the basement up until a month ago, when everything had been shuffled around to make room for the inn. How many spiders could have found those boxes? Surely, not many.

She took the largest flashlight she could find and climbed the rickety stairs to the attic. Standing in the middle of the attic, she turned in a circle and shined the light on the walls and floor: old furniture, grimy trunks, dusty boxes that had been stacked in place for years. But then the light shined on boxes that looked new. They weren’t dusty, and they had Rose’s handwriting on them. Her heart beat fast. She ripped
open the tape on the boxes. Inside were Luke and Sammy’s baby clothes, shoes, some drawings Mim had made in school, a Mother’s Day card signed by Tobe, the first nine-patch quilt square Bethany had made, which looked more like triangles. It was terrible! Why had Rose saved
that
?

In the last box was a bundle of letters tied in a blue ribbon, addressed to Rose, written by her father, dated before they were married.

Tears pricked Bethany’s eyes at the sight of her father’s graceful handwriting. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t.

Taking care, she put the letters back in the box and folded the box top. In her mind, she crossed off one more room on her mental list. Tobe’s books were not in the attic.

A beam from a thin moon streamed in the window. It fell across Mim’s bed and onto the rug. She lay on top of her bed, fully dressed, until she heard the bongs of the grandfather clock in the living room hit half past nine, then tiptoed downstairs. The house was dark, silent. She grabbed the flashlight her mother kept by the kitchen door before she quietly slipped out, then hurried to the hill behind the schoolhouse. An owl hooted and she stopped short, then laughed silently at herself. She stood for a moment, listening to the saw of the crickets, the gentle purr of the creek, the soft soughing of the wind, and her heart felt full.

High on the hill behind the schoolhouse, she saw Danny stooped over the telescope, peering through it. She called out to him and he straightened, then waved.

When she reached him, he stepped back from the telescope so she could peer into it.

“What am I looking at?”

“Jupiter. You can see the four moons.”

She squinted her eye and saw small dots of bright light all in a row and horizontal with the face of the planet. “I think I can see those moons. I actually can!”

“Those are the same four moons that Galileo saw with his first telescope five hundred years ago. Now scientists know that Jupiter has over a dozen moons, but I can only see the four with this telescope.”

She stepped away so Danny could have a turn. He peered through the small lens and turned a few knobs on the long tubes of the telescope.

“All of the moons orbit the planet in the same plane, but at different distances and speed, so each night they’re different. Tonight’s a good night to see them.”

She gazed up at the dome of the sky. “What’s that bright spot. A star?”

Danny kept peering through the telescope. “If it’s in the west and it’s lying low, it’s Venus.” He straightened up to see where she was gazing. “Pretty soon, we should be able to see Mars coming up in the east. Mars looks red compared to the brightness of Venus.”

Here, standing next to Danny in the crisp night air, with the black velvet sky dotted with diamonds, it was hard to feel as if anything could be wrong in the entire world.

Danny walked Mim all the way back to the end of her driveway, which she thought was very gallant. One more fact to add to her list about Danny Riehl. He was a gentleman.

They stopped to watch a little bat bounce through the air, taking bugs for his supper.

“Did you finish writing your vocabulary sentence?” Danny asked.

It was due tomorrow. Mim had been working at it all week, thinking of it nearly as often as she thought of stars and planets. And Danny. She recited it out loud to him: “The sibilant sound of the snake, eyeing the ort by the porch steps, was drowned out by the pother of my sudorific siblings, who refused to kowtow to danger.”

“I like it,” Danny said. “It’s very clever and smart. And it succeeds at meaning nothing.”

That was another true fact to add about Danny. He was incisive. A very incisive boy. It meant smart and insightful. Besides collecting facts, Mim collected words. In the very second when she looked toward him, he looked toward her. Then each turned away.

“I might be leaving Stoney Ridge,” Danny said, scuffing the ground with the top of his shoe.

Leaving?

“Going where? When?” Mim wondered, her eyes bigger than her head. “You don’t mean moving away?”
But . . . but . . . but . . . what about me?
She felt a pinch of panic in her tummy.

“My parents are talking about moving to a new settlement. Someplace in the south. My dad’s cousins live there and said there’s lots of good land that isn’t expensive. They want us to come too. My dad wants to go, but my mom isn’t sure.” He bent down to tie his shoe. “One good thing is that it would be close to NASA. That’s the headquarters for astronauts. You can see spaceships and moon rocks if you visit. I’d like to see NASA. My dad said that maybe we could go there sometime.” He straightened and poked his glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

Mim felt another pinch in her tummy. Would Danny still
want to be almost-an-astronaut if he saw moon rocks and spaceships? Or would he want to be a full-fledged astronaut?

Mim walked up the porch steps feeling very droopy, very down in the mouth at the thought of Danny going away. She felt like crying, and her mind was a pinball machine of exasperation with herself, with all of life. She tiptoed upstairs and flung herself into bed, but couldn’t sleep. So she went to the window and opened it, propping her elbows on the sill. She looked out over the farm, listening to the sounds of night, letting her thoughts roam at random.

She tried to imagine what her mother would say if she told her that Danny, the boy she loved, was going away. If she knew that Danny wanted to be almost-an-astronaut. If he didn’t come back from NASA headquarters, not ever. “You’ll manage,” she could hear her mother say. “Life will go on.”

But Mim saw change coming, and that was always a worry.

16

D
elia wondered if life was returning to normal for Charles, if he was proceeding with the legal separation. She told Will to go ahead and let his father know that her cancer was gone after he was back at school. She wondered what that news would mean to Charles. Relief from guilt, she supposed.

Trying to be more like Rose had not been going quite as well as Delia had hoped. She still wanted to wound Charles. She wanted him to hurt as badly as she hurt. She needed to work on this. Even though Delia didn’t know her well, Rose didn’t seem to harbor such evil thoughts toward her late husband. Or toward that sharp-tongued mother-in-law, either. Delia could hardly tolerate more than a brief encounter with Vera. She reminded her of a librarian who spent her days shushing people. Whenever Delia happened to see her in the yard or at the farmhouse, Vera would fling darts, such as, “Mercy, are you still here?” or “Isn’t it time you scooted on home?”

Delia didn’t want to scoot on home.

Before Will left, he had asked her how long she intended to stay in Stoney Ridge and she hadn’t had an answer for him.
She had the strangest feeling about this subject—as if she shouldn’t leave. Not yet. She wasn’t sure what it meant or where that gut feeling came from, but it felt as if a journey had begun for her and she still needed her travel documents. That sounded crazy, but that’s how she felt. There was something she needed to get—to receive—before she left.

Delia had come to admire the genuineness of these Amish people. Their faith in God, especially. She had always perceived God as belonging in a compartment, like a piece of a pie that made up a life. Rose spoke about God as if all of life belonged to him. God was the piecrust, holding the pieces of life together. In fact, the strength of Rose’s faith was part of why Delia had gone back to church last week. Rose seemed so happy and at peace even though she had been cast some serious blows. She hoped a little of what Rose believed would rub off on her.

When Delia was first getting acquainted with Rose, she seemed so calm and content that Delia honestly thought she might not be all that bright. She was embarrassed to admit it, but it was true. Most smart people she knew, including Charles, were forever complaining about the state of the world. They had all kinds of opinions on all kinds of subjects, but she’d rarely seen any of them do anything besides complain. As far as they were concerned, the world was bad and getting worse.

Rose didn’t seem to trouble herself about the condition of the world. She was the kind of person who didn’t discuss problems—she quietly set to work to solve them. And she had plenty of problems: her animals, her children, her cranky mother-in-law.